Maja Nydal Eriksen for Global Campus Visual Contest 2018

The photographer and curator Maja Nydal Eriksen is among the diverse members of the Jury of the Global Campus Visual Contest 2018 “Diversity and Inclusion”. In 2017 she won the professional category of the Global Campus Visual Contest with the picture “Shakira”.

 

100% Fremmed? (100% Foreign?) is her last project, a living archive with 100 stories, 100 photos and 100 voices of citizens who statistically represent the 161.000 people given asylum in Denmark 1956-2017.

 

With this exhibition, a hundred citizens, all former refugees from 29 countries tell their different stories about being a citizen in Denmark today and whether they feel foreign or not. Stories of belonging, longing and dreams, memories of people and places, views on society, gender, culture and religion.

 

100% Fremmed? (100% Foreign?) will be touring to 20 Danish cities during 2018-19. In each city, 10 new portraits of local former refugees will be added thus creating basis for new stories and meetings in the future.

 

Many refugees undergo traumatic experiences both in their home countries and during their journeys to reach their new country of residence. When they make it to a new country, the path for their inclusion and integration in the community might present other barriers, prejudices, discriminations. The Global Campus Visual Contest 2018 would like to be an opportunity to raise awareness of diversity and inclusion in our societies.

 

“I have no ambition of returning to my home country like a lot of other foreigners talk about. I am 50% foreign, but only because everybody keeps asking me where I come from”, Cong Hung Nguyen, 54, male, in a relationship, child, Copenhagen N, cleaner in Tivoli, from Vietnam, came to Denmark in 1992, residence permit same year.

 

Photo credit cover 100% Fremmed

 

100%FOREIGN? – an introduction